Grinspoon

A competition entry from Lismore

Grinspoon formed in Lismore, in northern New South Wales, in July 1995: Phil Jamieson on vocals and guitar, Pat Davern on guitar, Joe Hansen on bass, Kristian Hopes on drums. That same year they entered the first running of triple j's Unearthed competition and won it with "Sickfest", a short, blunt piece of post-grunge that set the template for most of what followed. The band took its name from Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard psychiatry professor known for making the case for medical cannabis.

Jamieson, born in Hornsby in April 1977, grew up around music — his parents played in a Christian rock band that toured Baptist church missions — but Grinspoon's early reputation was built on volume and speed rather than anything devotional. The Unearthed win put them on national radio before they had an album to sell, and by late 1998 they had been signed to Universal in the United States, an unusual position for four men from a regional town. The line-up has never changed in thirty-one years.

The platinum run

Guide to Better Living arrived on 16 September 1997 on Grudge Records through Universal Music Australia, produced by Phillip McKellar. It peaked at No. 11 but held the ARIA chart for 36 weeks and reached double platinum, 140,000 units shipped. Its five singles — "Pedestrian", "DC×3", "Repeat", "Just Ace" and "Don't Go Away" — still account for a sizeable share of the live set nearly three decades on. The album brought a Breakthrough Artist nomination at the 1998 ARIA Awards.

What followed was a decade of high chart placings: Easy in 1999 at No. 4, New Detention in 2002 at No. 2, Thrills, Kills & Sunday Pills in 2004 at No. 4, each certified platinum. New Detention carried "Chemical Heart", the slower song that remains the band's most widely known and the one that pulled in an audience beyond the mosh pit. Thrills, Kills & Sunday Pills won the ARIA for Best Rock Album in 2005, after nine earlier nominations had gone nowhere. Alibis & Other Lies reached No. 2 in 2007 and Six to Midnight No. 6 in 2009. All eight of the band's studio albums have made the ARIA top ten.

Stopping, and starting again

Black Rabbits came out in 2012 and peaked at No. 8; its single "Passerby" was shortlisted for the APRA Song of the Year in 2013. On 5 December 2013 the band announced an indefinite hiatus.

Jamieson filled the gap elsewhere. He played St Jimmy in the Australian premiere of American Idiot in Brisbane in March 2017 and again on the 2018 national tour, and released a first solo album, Somebody Else, in July 2022, which reached No. 51.

The band came back in stages: a short run opening for Cold Chisel in 2015, then a 20th-anniversary tour for Guide to Better Living announced in 2017, which prompted a reissue that charted higher than the original at No. 8. From that point the touring was the whole business — anniversary shows, festival slots, back catalogue, no new records.

Closing a twelve-year gap

Jamieson has been direct about why that could not continue. "We couldn't keep on doing this retrospective thing; it's cute, but it's ultimately not very creatively satisfying," he said of the band's position before the eighth album.

Whatever, Whatever was released on 9 August 2024 through the band's own imprint and Universal: fifteen tracks in 35 minutes, produced by Oscar Dawson of Holy Holy. The first single, "Unknown Pretenders", had been written in February 2020 and came out on 19 May 2024, followed by "Never Say Never" on 16 July and "The Only One" on release day. The album peaked at No. 3, the band's best placing since 2007, and was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 2024 ARIA Awards. Double J's review described it as work that "maintains Grinspoon's enduringly successful reputation as flag-bearers of Australian rock music".

The record was supported by the Whatever, Whenever, Wherever tour, more than forty dates across the country with Press Club in support. Reviewers of those shows — Melbourne, Hobart and Perth among them — reported the same thing: the new songs sat beside the 1990s material without any obvious seam, which is not how twelve-year gaps usually work.

Thirty years, then a fractured L1

On 15 May 2025 the band announced the 30th Birthday Bonanza, with tickets on sale from 22 May. It ran from festival appearances at Night at the Parkland in Brisbane on 12 September and Night at the Barracks at Manly on 4 October into theatre dates: AEC Theatre in Adelaide on 1 November, Red Hill Auditorium in Perth on 8 November, NEX in Newcastle on 29 November, the UC Refectory in Canberra on 13 December, and the Forum in Melbourne on 19 and 20 December. Supports rotated by city — Bad//Dreems, Regurgitator, Loose Content, Molly Rocket, Purple Disturbance and Lonesome Dove. "We are beyond humbled and downright flippin' thrilled to be celebrating our 30th anniversary," the band said at the announcement.

Most of 2026 has been shaped by Jamieson's solo work, and then by an accident. His second solo album, 10Charlie, was produced again by Oscar Dawson and released in August 2026 on ORiGiN Recordings — nine tracks, roughly half an hour, with You Am I guitarist Davey Lane among the contributors. It reached No. 18. The title comes from his preferred aisle seat on a plane, and the songs deal with grief and middle age rather than with anything Grinspoon would play loud; one, "Reading Keats in Byron Bay", was written after the death of a friend.

A week before that release, on Friday 7 August 2026, Jamieson slipped on stage and struck his back on a drum riser. He spent the night in emergency at Latrobe Hospital and by 4am had been confirmed to have fractured his L1 vertebra. "No-one is more bummed about this than me, but I can't stand up let alone play a gig," he wrote, cancelling the remaining forty-plus dates of the PJ AIR tour, which had been due to run through September across every state and territory.

Grinspoon's own diary survived it. The band had played Festivale at City Park in Launceston on 30 January 2026, and five weeks after the fall they headlined the Friday of the NFL Kickoff Festival at Melbourne Park on 11 September, on a bill with Hot Dub Time Machine and Public Figures. Their next confirmed dates are the three Good Things Festival shows — Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne on 4 December, Sydney Showground on 5 December, Brisbane Showgrounds on 6 December, all 16-plus — under headliners Limp Bizkit, Simple Plan and Spiritbox, followed by the Grand Ballroom's 15th-birthday show at Eatons Hill Hotel in Queensland on 18 December.

What the show amounts to now

The headline shows at the end of the 30th Birthday Bonanza were the most produced of the band's career. The Rockpit, reviewing the Forum on 19 December 2025, rated it among the two best productions it had seen at that venue that year: a Western-themed visual package built on archival footage and montages that ran behind the band rather than over it, and a mix it called near perfect. Jamieson worked the stage hard and talked very little between songs.

The sets draw across all eight albums without turning into a retrospective. Recent ones have opened with "Unknown Pretenders" from the 2024 album before dropping straight into "DC×3" and "Just Ace", held "Chemical Heart" and "1000 Miles" back for the last third, and used INXS's "Don't Change" as the cover. "More Than You Are" has been the closer. Crowds at the 2025 theatre shows moshed and crowd-surfed through it, which at thirty years in says more about the material than about nostalgia.